Author: Ian

When the angels opened the box that contained the body parts that would make Jaycee a recognisable human being, they must have been drunk.

Either that or one of them had told a joke of such hilarious proportions that their concentration had wandered from the Conveyor Belt of Life and instead of fitting Jaycee together in an acceptable fashion, they had giggled uncontrollably and thereby botched the job.

Whatever the reason, there was no doubt that with Jaycee, there had been…mistakes.

Let me put it another way.

If there was such a thing as a shop where you could buy a limp of your choice, then Jaycee had without doubt, bought the best one in the store and that’s not all. On the day Jaycee visited they must have had a promotion going, an offer that included free ugliness with every limp purchased.

I’m sorry and all that but someone has to say it and it might as well be me, poor Jaycee was one of the most hideous men I had ever seen.

So alarming was his visage that handsome lessons for life would have been wasted on him.

Jaycee had it bad.

Someone, and I guess I’m talking God here, someone had dealt him from the bottom of the pack.

However, before I’m accused of being nothing more than a cruel and heartless beast, it really ought to be pointed out that Jaycee made no efforts to help himself.

In my defence I’d like to call as my first witnesses…

Jaycee’s clothes.

I’d like to call them, but they couldn’t come…they ‘re real tied up at the moment.

They’re stuck to his body.

This is what I mean about Jaycee not helping himself, Jaycee’s clothes have been with him for so long that they’d taken root and clung to him like a second skin.

On the whole Jaycee was a sorry specimen and like sorry specimens everywhere, he spent most of his waking hours, as the neighbourhood target.

Jaycee was there to be boffed (my word), bashed and abused whenever it took anyone’s fancy.

It was his lot in life and before you raise your hands and your voice in protest, think about it.

Jaycee’s lot had worth…and was not without some historical context.

If this had been sometime in our not too recent past, Jaycee would have worn the mantle…village idiot.

He would have been revered for his ability to remove the stresses and strains from so-called normal life.

Poor harvest?

Punch Jaycee.

 Wife gone down with boils.

Put Jaycee (scapegoat) in the stocks.

Let’s face it, before the cat was domesticated enough to kick, the likes of Jaycee were seen as a godsend and were, more than likely, the first ever therapies.

Although, in our PC driven society we would like to push such thoughts to the back of our minds, the truth of the matter is, times haven’t changed that much.

People like Jaycee still exist on the edge of most so-called ‘normal/civilised’ communities and are still abused in that good-old time-honoured manner that we accept and have all become familiar with.

People like Jaycee are allowed to become part of the sights, sounds and smells of whatever it is that passes for everyday life.

They’re allowed to wander around displaying their own particular brand of weirdness for all to see and no-one apparently, gives a damn.

They can dribble, talk to themselves and shout at their invisible companions to their hearts content.

However, working on the basis that you have to draw the line somewhere, what they must not do is…rock the boat.

Now.

Rocking the boat consists of a small number of no-noes. Some of the more serious I will attempt to list.

On no account will Jaycee (or the likes of), take part in…

One…The frightening of small children or horses.
Two…The keeping of unreasonable hours.
Three…The consumption of alcohol in the street.
Four…The opening of trouser zippers…and last but not least;
Five…The leering at women’s breasts.

Stick to these rules and for people of Jaycee’s ilk everything will be hunky-dory.

If the weirdly strange like Jaycee can fulfil their set role with the minimum of fuss and bother, then they’re tolerated and free to come and go more-or-less as they please.

In truth of course, Jaycee serves a purpose. ..i.e…

Everyone Loves A Scapegoat.

Enough. I’m supposed to be telling a story here…so…..

When we were kids, Fat Freddy and me would lean out of his mother’s bedroom window and wait for Jaycee to come stumbling past, which he did at four thirty every single day of the year, never late, never early, always smack on time and heading for God knows where.

Clump…drag….clump…drag. Clump…drag….clump…drag. Clump…drag….clump…drag.

Me and Fat Freddy, upon registering the echoing street acoustics and according to our mood at the time, would run to the window, stick out our heads and yell… ‘Hey…twisted man’ or ‘Look at the freak…look at the freak’.

Thankfully, (if that’s the correct way to put it), ‘Hey twisted man’ and “Look at the freak…look at the freak” was as bad as it got.

At that time in our youth neither Fat Freddy or I had ever heard of Victor Hugo or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, so Jaycee was spared, ‘The bells…the bells’.

In short, Fat Freddy and me…we were evil little bastards.

For what we put Jaycee through both of us should have been birched within an inch of our lives or even worse.

However and I promise you that this is not meant as an excuse, we were not the worst.

What it was with the kids on my street and is with kids everywhere even today, is the big B. Boredom.

Idle hands and all that stuff.

Some say what kids need is a hobby…and boy did they find one in our neighbourhood.

You can forget train spotting or stamp collecting.

For hobby come pleasurable pastime and activity…read Jaycee.

I didn’t see it and neither did Fat Freddy.

What we got was the aftermath.

We both missed the actual dirty deed because our attention was taken by other things.

Fat Freddie was busy studying himself in his mother’s full-length mirror.

He was licking his lips and admiring the way her wedding dress highlighted his curves.

While I looked on in amazement at the deftness, skill and speed with which he made his way around the room wearing six-inch stilettos, (a skill that would serve him well in later life-but that’s another story) and listened to him pleading, ‘It’s a little tight under the arms, don’t you think’? I almost missed the terrifying screams that were filtering up from the street below.

It was four thirty…Jaycee time.

Odd, but on that particular occasion we had no mind to abuse him. He could have passed below that window and we couldn’t have cared less. Even little shits like us needed a break.

It was the unearthly scream that did it…

In our headlong rush to get to the window, Fat Freddie’s skill with women’s shoes inexplicably left him and he fell, losing two teeth to the corner of the bed. In normal circumstances Fat Freddy, who in those days was an out and out wimp, would have yelled the house down.

As it was, something much more terrible was going on and Fat Freddie’s pain paled into insignificance.

We took up our usual positions at the window and were stunned into silence at what we saw below us.

Jaycee was burning. Jaycee was a column of red fire.

I don’t know what was worse, Jaycee aflame or the group of mutant children clutching cans of lighter fuel and hair spray, who fell about laughing a few yards behind him.

Apart from my horror and my helplessness, the other thing that will always stay with me was the smell.

The odour of burning human flesh wafted up to our vantage point, causing me to puke violently over Fat Freddy and perhaps more seriously, his mother’s wedding dress.

To this day I can’t eat barbecued food.

Fat Freddy never said a word.

His and my total attention was fixed on poor flaming Jaycee as he clumped…dragged…clumped down that terrible and wicked street, now seemingly oblivious to what must have been searing pain. The scream had faded and had given way to…motion.

Not panic. Not fear. Just this insane desire to do what he always did.

Clump…drag….clump…drag. Clump…drag….clump…drag. Clump…drag….clump…drag.

What kept him going I don’t know. But whatever it was Jaycee was apparently determined to keep his mystery appointment.

It turns out that the screams we heard were not Jaycee’s.

An unknown woman passing by had witnessed the mayhem, clutched at her ears, drew in enough air to deprive us all of oxygen and made a sound like god knows what, then promptly fainted.

Me too.

When I finally returned to the land of the living, the only thing that remained to remind me of the sheer horror of what little we had actually witnessed, was the impression of Jaycee’s footprints that were melted into the tar at the side of the road.

Anyway, Jaycee didn’t die.

He’s still with us and every now and then, a guilty community remembers that terrible day and gets itself together to raise funds to update his wheelchair.

Jaycee’s motorised now and a beacon to us all.

And it has to be said, I do miss the… Clump…drag….clump…drag. lump…drag…. clump…drag of Jaycee on route to…to…wherever.

The first dead body I ever saw belonged to Mrs Maynard.
Belonged?

That sounds stupid.

The truth of the matter is that when I saw it, the body that is, it didn’t belong to anyone. Not me. Not you and certainly not to Mrs Maynard who had no further use for it.

No, if it belonged to anyone then it had to be to the tall, thin, miserable looking man in the black suit. The man who had come to take her away.

All these thoughts and more swam through my head as I gazed down on the deceased old lady in the bed, who, to be quite honest I didn’t recognise until I heard someone mention her name.

I was a kid.

I was puzzled, confused and more than a little frightened. And as my mother squirmed at the tightness with which I squeezed her hand, wondered what I was doing here.

Why had my mother brought me to this dark place?

To look at a dead person?

If so, why?

Was this another one of those weird grown-up things?

Was this something about the necessity of facing up to the truth about life…and er…death?

Maybe something to do with the health-giving qualities of not hiding behind statements like, ‘Mrs Maynard’s gone to sleep’.

Or was this about inflicting enough trauma (re the facts of life), upon your innocent child to make him wet himself?

Mother had form in this department.

This was how me and spinach were introduced. Shock treatment. Green and horrible it suddenly appeared on my plate.

Seems to have done the trick. I haven’t touched it since.

Anyway, when I finally realised who the stiff was, I calmed down. I wasn’t frightened anymore, just surprised as to how different she looked in death.

Younger for one thing.

Her face had taken on a smoothness that belied her one hundred and fifty years.

Ok, so I now know that she wasn’t and couldn’t have been one hundred and fifty years old but at the time I was a dumb kid, and kids, dumb or otherwise, live in a world of their own making.

They use their imagination. They fantasise. They exaggerate. They paint the world from a pallet of their own choosing. In short, they tell huge lies.

And that was us. Me, Fat Freddy, Smells Warburton and Four Eyes Phillips.

Me and the guys had decided some time ago that Mrs Maynard was the oldest person in the world.

By our calculations she was somewhere in the region of one hundred and fifty years old.

Let me explain.

Seems ridiculous now, but once we spent a whole afternoon peering through her windows and following her on the street. All in an attempt to count the wrinkles on her face.

This was all down to Fat Freddy who told us in all sincerity that, that was how you determined someone’s age. It did not just apply to trees.

When Smells Warburton lied through his teeth and told us he had counted one hundred and fifty folds of skin, that was it, decision made.

Mrs Maynard was one hundred and fifty years old.

Whatever her real age, we couldn’t have been far wrong because here she was, dead.

And as I related my experience to the boys that evening, we agreed, only very old people die.

It’s a terrible admission to make but there was no sadness in us.

If I remember correctly, a short discussion ensued on whether or not there was life after death but that was all. No pity. No regret. No nothing.

The only other thing I remember about the discussion was Smells insisting that heaven was full of large naked ladies and fat flying babies.

Oh yes, and Four Eyes Phillips declaring with the kind of certainty that I now associate with Christian fundamentalists, that when he arrived in heaven, he wouldn’t have to wear the thick ‘milk-bottle’ lenses that we’d all become familiar with.

One thing in our favour that does needs saying…although we weren’t sorry at her passing we did not rejoice…

well…not totally.

Look. We were kids

We were a million miles away.

And to be totally honest, and in the pursuit of truth, there was a reason why Fat Freddie, Smells Warburton, Four Eyes Phillips and me, were, not totally consumed with grief.

I’ll tell you for why.

What me and the guys were experiencing regarding the passing of Mrs Maynard, is best described as, relief.

You see and believe me when I say I mean no disrespect, Mrs Maynard played a large part in our lives that was now, with her demise, thankfully, gone for ever.

See, what Mrs Maynard did, or to be more precise, used to do that affected our young lives so very much, was…and you may laugh…was…knitting.

This was how it worked.

In those days’ times were hard.

Luxuries, and that includes food and heat, were thin on the ground.

Day to day living was hand to mouth. No-one had any money and if you were lucky enough to find yourself unexpectedly at the correct end of an inheritance, legal or otherwise, you upped sticks and got the hell out of there. The lucky ones left before their dust did and who could blame them?

For us poor bastards that were left behind the struggle continued. The name of the game was survival, and the rules worked, as best as they could, on the ‘something for nothing’ basis.

This, I must make clear, did not include stealing, (mostly). At least not from your own.

If you stole from your neighbour then you were dead meat, no question.

What we did was help each other out.

True. We used our brains and looked to our own for answers to all those questions on the all-important subject of, ‘getting by’.

Recycling for example. (Please note: Recycling is not a new concept). Recycling was a skilful necessity in our neighbourhood, a long time before you rich folks began separating your green and brown wine bottles.

For our poverty-stricken neighbourhood, much was made of discovering and exploiting the human resources and skills that existed within our own community.

If someone had a particular insight into anything that would benefit the neighbourhood, then it was harnessed immediately and used positively for the good of all.

In Mrs Maynard’s case it happened to be knitting.

Which she did, all the time, day in-day out.

Every hour that God sent Mrs Maynard knitted. From the early hours of the morning ‘till late at night, weekends included.

She was knitting when she gave birth to her two sets of twins and she knitted graveside when her husband (Mr Maynard), was laid to rest.

She knitted subconsciously.

She knitted in her sleep, and when nature called, she kept on knitting.

When she walked, she knitted. When she talked, she knitted.

She was even found needles in hand (so they say), when the Grim Reaper made his personal call.

(I have a theory that he only turned up to order a pullover).

Her constant clitter-clatter only ceased when she was utilising her other skill, unravelling.

If there was an Olympic section, Mrs Maynard could have knitted and unravelled for her country.

History has it that when Mrs Maynard’s skills with the needles first came to the attention of the community, family members desperate for warm clothes for their long-suffering children, emerged from the darkest depths of the neighbourhood laden down with sacks of worn out clothing to be unravelled and resurrected.

People, (who if they really loved their kids should have known better), would arrive on her doorstep, pay her the agreed fee and within one calendar month Mrs Maynard would come up with the goods, (usually a pullover. In my case, always a pullover).

In this way it wasn’t long before Mrs Maynard became the stuff of legend and, I hate to admit, a curse on every child’s lips.

You see, us kids, unlike our parents, hated and despised Mrs Maynard’s woollen concoctions.

To put it bluntly, (this was how we kids saw it), forget the money saved, forget the fact that she kept us warm in winter. The point was, (and try telling this to your ma and pa), the point was, Mrs Maynard’s woollen wear made us look stupid. In our neighbourhood, it was a recognised phenomenon that kids who wore the House of Maynard never smiled again.

Unfortunately, me and my friends those who were ‘dressed’ almost exclusively by Mrs Maynard, never wore it well.

We carried the mark of Maynard with shame and disgust.

The pullovers were grey and the wool stiff from overuse and distant genetic memories of having been a sock in a previous life. And that was not all…

Mrs Maynard smoked. And I mean smoked. We’re talking heavyweight inhalation here.

We’re talking near a hundred cigarettes (if she was on form), a day.

While her knurled, nicotine-stained fingers gripped her tools tightly and clicked mercilessly away, a long unfiltered King-size dangled dangerously from her lip, sending a thin stream of blue smoke upward, to filter through and stain her hair yellow for ever.

Now, I’ve been a smoker.

And although I quit some years ago I consider myself lucky enough not to have fallen into the trap of becoming holier-than-thou. If people want to smoke that’s fine by me. And to be quite honest when I see others pulling on the weed, I still feel a distant pang in my chest and a sense of missing out.

What I’m saying is this, I have no problem with those who smoke. Invent me a safe cigarette, reduce the likelihood of me rotting from the inside out and I’ll suck on it with the rest of them. However, I would have to draw the line at Mrs Maynard. She was a definite no-go area.

OK, I’m gonna pause here and suggest that if you are eating finish up quick before moving on.

You finished? Good.

I will resume.

When Mrs Maynard smoked, she coughed.

And when Mrs Maynard coughed, she would empty the contents of her bubbling lungs over mine and my friends’ embryonic pullovers.

This meant, and not wishing to go into too much detail, this meant, er…stuff…mingling with the forming fibres.

The thing is, you never knew what it was you were pulling over your head.

The anguished cry that would echo around the neighbourhood usually about Christmas time was , ‘Mrs Maynard’s pullovers stink’. A statement based not on the particular style of garment, but a literal fact.

When the finished article arrived from Mrs Maynard’s house it was seventy-five percent nicotine. Ten percent an unidentifiable gluttonous substance and fifteen percent recycled wool.

To put it on was akin to dipping your face into a janitor’s bucket full of week old cigarette butts.

It was horrible and vile both at the same time.

It made you feel like you had smoked Mrs Maynard’s total tobacco intake.

It left you with a blinding headache, failing eyesight and a nicotine addiction problem that you would come to regret in later life.

I hated those pullovers with a passion.

The knowledge that another one might be under construction gave me and the juvenile population of our small township, regular nightmares.

So…

As I stood hand in hand with my mother looking down on that lifeless corpse, I have to admit I smiled.

Cruel as it may seem, now with Mrs Maynard dead and gone, life could now take on a much more pleasant hue.

So much so, that I almost didn’t mind wearing a Maynard creation for the funeral.

Almost…

End.

 Davey Stoker was not a well-liked man.

I don’t necessarily mean he was hated, but he was the kind of guy whose funeral you could guarantee would not be that well attended.

That’s not to say he wouldn’t be missed.

There’s no doubt in my mind that folks would, after a suitable period of Davey Stoker-free time, wonder where the hell he’d gone and upon being told he was dead would say, ‘Oh…shame’.

 The thing is, they wouldn’t really care.

His was a personality that you could take or leave. And to be truthful, if you had that kind of choice, you would more than likely, leave, you know what I mean.

And just to continue with the ‘dead’ theme for a moment, if you did happen to find yourself at the cemetery to see him laid to rest then you’d be there out of curiosity and not because you were grieving a whole lot. Actually, and in all truth, you’d be there because you wanted to make sure he would stay down.

In his time Davey Stoker was called many things, stupid being one of the more frequent.

Yet despite this, in our neighbourhood he was somewhat of a living legend.

He had what is sometimes referred to as a, ‘claim to fame’.

Davey was renowned far and wide for his ability to ingest an enormous variety and number of illegal substances, and… remain upright.

One of his other er, ‘qualities’ was his extreme arrogance.

He’d take to roaming the streets of the borough with what can only be called, an air of smug self-satisfaction and an attitude that said out loud,

‘Look at me I’m invincible’.

 Now the odd thing is, and it has to be said, no matter what your personal feelings as to Davey Stoker’s right to life, you couldn’t help agreeing that this aggressive self-assessment, ‘Look at me I’m invincible’ did in fact have the ring of truth about it.

If you knew Davey like I knew Davey, then you’d know he actually did appear bombproof, bullet-proof and if I didn’t know better, immune to all diseases known to man.

Davey Stoker was in many ways, a very lucky guy. Which, considering his precarious lifestyle was beyond belief.

Take for starters, his amazing substance consumption.

Toxic substances of various descriptions and prescriptions would be introduced any way possible (or impossible) into his slight frame on a daily basis.

Davey found routes for his drugs that the average addict did not have the imagination to think of. 24/7.

Such were the levels of chemicals in his blood, that I have personally witnessed flies landing on him and keeling over almost immediately.

Herein lies an obvious question.

It would not take a mathematics/chemist (?) professor long to work out that for Davey to remain at his preferred level of toxicity, i.e. high, then he would have to be living off a fair-sized inheritance or have the borrowing capacity of a small third world country.

So how did Davey manage it?

Easy.

Davey Stoker’s World Bank was…

The Morelli Brothers.

 Vince and Quince (true) Morelli, bankrolled Davy and his unsavoury habits in return for the odd piece of dirty work.

As the Morelli brothers had their grubby little fingers in most pies, you could be sure that this ‘dirty work’ took the form of anything from the wallpapering of an old lady’s front room to the punishment of said old lady for not paying the fee for the wallpapering of said room.

The Morelli’s were like that.

They saw themselves as a cross between Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham.

They ruled over an area the size of a Religious Parish with an iron fist inside a brass knuckle-duster.

The Morelli’s were the Spawn of Satan minus brains.

Davey Stoker worked for the Morells as ‘Arson Man’.

Everyone knew this as fact.

There were too many occasions when Davey was seen running from the scene of a small explosion with smouldering hair and his pants on fire to think otherwise.

Hence Davey often found himself detained by the police only for one swift visit from the Morelli family lawyer allowing Davey to hold on to his unbroken record of never being charred-sorry-charged.

It was no secret Davey Stoker worked for the Morellis. And it worked well for him.

As the Morellis muscle and main man he had immunity and therefore was a force to be reckoned with. He was a man with dangerous connections.

Ergo. If you had occasion to talk with Davey Stoker, no matter how stupid you knew he was, you laughed at all his pathetic jokes.

Nobody was sure what happened to turn things around.

 But turn around they did.

Some say Davey got religion.

Personally, I find that hard to believe, as a few weeks previous Davey had given Father Delaney a severe beating as a reminder that he owed money to the Morelli’s ‘collection’.

Holiness was out of the question.

Whatever it was that had caused the change to Davey Stoker, it was a major surprise. Nay – major shock to everyone.

People pondered.

Had Davy had discovered a new drug?

A bravery drug maybe?

Whatever it was, something gave Davey the push to quit the Morelli camp.

One morning Davey Stoker woke up and just said, no.

No to anything of a dubious nature and perhaps more shockingly, NO to the Morellis.

It goes without saying that from that day forth, things took their inevitable course.

As is the Morelli’s wont, especially when they’re upset, they shot guns at Davey. They missed.

They bombed Davey. He wasn’t in but his mother was. (It was a nice funeral).

They cut the brake cables on Davey’s car. Unfortunately for them, Davey didn’t own a car (that was a nice funeral too). And so on, and so on.

No matter how hard they tried, a catalogue of bungled attempts at ending Davey’s life followed one after another.

All in all, the community lost count of the number of times the mad brothers Morelli tried sending Davey to meet Jesus. None of which were successful. (We could almost hear Jesus breathing a sigh of relief).

If it had not been so serious it would have been funny because so bad were the Morelli brothers at doing their own dirty work, that Vince Morelli lost three fingers off his right hand when a small parcel bomb he was keeping in his jacket pocket, ‘for later’, exploded prematurely.

Quince faired no better, suffering a lapse of memory and drinking a concoction (during a ravenous lunch break), he had prepared earlier to aid Davey’s demise.

Anyway, for Davey Stoker these accidents worked out to be blessings in disguise for Davey.

Vince Morelli’s disfigurement and Quince’s poisonous mishap was the end of it.

For what was probably the only instance in the Morelli’s grisly family history, they gave up on a vendetta and let Davey Stoker walk free.

They never spoke of it again, and apart from spitting on the pavement every time they passed a member of Davey’s household, it seemed like it was really, actually over.

It looked like Davey Stoker could and would live out his remaining years in his normal luck-filled fashion.

Wrong.

It was such a tiny object.

So small to be almost invisible to the naked eye.

It was amazing to think that such a small thing had probably been twice around the Universe and then back again.

That the last time it passed the planet Earth, Jesus was living it up with his mother at a party in Canaan and the time before that my ancestor was chewing at a dinosaur bone.

If only it could talk.

The sights it must have seen.

Round and round, star system to star system.

Light year to light year.

Amazing.

And here it was again, but this time, its long journey was finally over.

Snug and cosy the baby meteorite had found a home, a final resting place.

Embedded three inches into Davey Stoker’s mashed up brain.

And you know, he never felt a thing.

Lucky swine.

Lucky Davey Stoker.

end